Tag Archives: culture

The NAACP is Right on This

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There’s a school district in Prince George’s County, MD (which works out to suburban DC), that’s looking to set up two public (not private) high schools for immigrants and second generation students who don’t speak English—and to teach in their old country language.

The NAACP is objecting, and they’re right on this one, albeit for some wrong reasons. Bob Ross, president of the Prince George’s County branch of the NAACP, had this:

It risks turning Prince George’s County into a segregated school system[.]

He said the setup is a violation of Brown v Board of Education, and he’s close. He’s also worried that this will divert resources from the existing school system, and he’s right here, too. This objection, though, isn’t that important; any effort to add schools will divert those resources.

Tehani Collazo, Senior Director of Casa’s Schools and Community Engagement section, disagreed, also with reason:

If we are saying all [English-language-learning] students must go to these schools, that’s one thing. But we are not.

Like the many that already exist across the country, the International Schools are schools of choice. They are built on an innovative and proven model that will help support the needs of our most struggling group of learners—English Language Learners.

They’re both missing the larger point, though, about American education in this context. The segregation argument is close, but it misses.   Brown was about forced segregation; this is voluntary.

On the other hand, “schools of choice” are appropriate for a lot of things, but not in this context. There can’t be any choice about being taught in English.

Immigrants need to assimilate into American culture; it’s our culture that has created the opportunities we have and that underlie our enormous success. Our culture isn’t learned by students and their families holding themselves apart from it, which is what happens when students go to American schools to learn in their own language instead of in English.

Language is thought, and English is the language of American culture. It’s entirely likely that English needs to be taught with greater emphasis in those of our public schools that have large fractions of their student populations who don’t speak a version of English natively. However, public funds should not be spent on public schools that will teach only in a foreign language. That’s not how American culture will be learned; that’s not how immigrants will assimilate.

A Right Answer

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And a righteous one.

The public schools’ association for religion teachers, Religionslærerforeningen, has today urged that the controversial Mohammed Cartoons, which were first printed in Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005, should become part of the public school curriculum as quickly as possible.

The RLF is a Danish teachers’ organization. The Danish government is starting to get on board, too.

And now, several political parties—including Socialdemokraterne, Dansk Folkeparti (DF) and Konservative—have voiced their support for that idea, although the degree of support varies.

“It would be natural for the cartoons to become part of the material that the teachers can choose to use,” [according to Konservative’s spokeswoman Mai Mercado].

DF is a bit more forward in its view of the matter. According to their immigration spokesman, Martin Henriksen,

One of our time’s great challenges is the threat from Islamism and the pressure on freedom rights that have built up over many years.

If they really want to do something right, in terms of making sure that the students—including those with a Muslim background—know which freedom rights we have in Denmark, they should go all the way.

 

h/t The Washington Post.

A Conservative’s View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts

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It’s out.

This is the first of a pair of publications on American policy; the other is concerned with National Policy, which consists of foreign and defense policy.

Domestic Policy both is necessary in its own right and must come before National Policy since a sound policy domestically is absolutely required both for the health of the nation within our borders and to facilitate—indeed, to enable—any form of outward-facing policy at the national level.

Domestic Policy is a combination of social and economic policies. Social Policy consists of these things: the concept of the American nation; American citizenship; the role of faith in our society; the role of immigration and its importance to our society; the importance of consensus; and the role of education.

Economic Policy consists of these things: the nature of a free market and its condition as the most moral system and the one most conducive to generating prosperity for all (even though there always will be some more or less prosperous than others), the role of the Federal government in protecting and enhancing our economy, and the role of Federal regulation in facilitating our economy.

Of course, these two major divisions of Domestic Policy are not truly separate from each other any more than biology, chemistry, and physics are separate from each other within science. Just as we divide scientific disciplines from each other to facilitate inquiry and discussion, I’m separating domestic policy into these divisions to facilitate a similar inquiry and discussion—while remaining fully aware and making occasional use of their very large areas of overlap.

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This is Pretty Clear

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Regarding DHS’ potential shutdown, here’s Speaker John Boehner (R, OH):

We want to get a conference with the Senate. Now, they’ve made clear that they don’t want to go to conference. But they’re going to have a vote.

And

A spokesman for [Senator Harry (D, NV)] Reid said Sunday there will be no negotiations with the House over Homeland Security funding and immigration.

That spokesman, Adam Jentleson, added:

Senator Reid has been clear for days on the fact that there will be no conference[.]

Finally, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA):

We want a clean bill. I see nothing else happening, other than a clean bill.

There you have it. The Democratic Party of No is intent on shutting down DHS in order to support President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional immigration-related “executive actions.”

Structure and Assimilation

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A commenter on a blog I follow talked briefly about this as part of a larger comment. The thrust of the aside concerned the ink spilled arguing about government structure, but that while structure is important, what’s at bottom is “an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society” that’s hard to manage.

I think that proceeds from a false premise.

Our society need not be “increasingly complex and heterogeneous.” Certainly the technology we use in our society grows more complex, and even more heterogeneous (recall the hoops being jumped through to get Microsoft Windows-based programs to run on an Apple PC, or the hoops requiring satisfaction to get Linux-based systems and Microsoft-based systems to play nice together, to take just one small area). The training and education needed to operate our technologies also grows in depth, breadth, and length of time to achieve operational capacity (just try to let your Ford or Chrysler be all it can be without reading a multi-hundred page tech manual first).

But our society, our interactions with each other and our government need not be more complex or more heterogeneous. Our nation was founded on some simple principles, with personal responsibility and a personal duty to look after those who cannot look after themselves at their core. These are not complex principles. We just over-engineer them as we try to get government to do more and more for us while demanding ever greater and greater precision in execution.

Our current…heterogeneity…also results from an overemphasis of the value of other ways, other moralities, at the expense of our ways and the Judeo-Christian morality at the heart of our nation. That overemphasis flows from, among a number of causes, a lack of effort at assimilation—by us of those who come into our country and by those who come here from other countries. Too many immigrants value their old ways and morals over the ways and morals that created the environment here that contains the very opportunities for which those immigrants and visitors came. And we let them not assimilate, we don’t encourage them or help them reconcile their ways with ours and live with our ways in our house. That failure comes from the nonsense of moral equivalence.